give them a little hypocrisy. The mauners of all are improved, and unquestionably the morals of inany." ness," said I; "but it is calculcated to arrest the attention of the multitude; and probably, in the course of the evening, they might hear something better. Had this man, liķe St. Paul himself, reasoned of righteousness, tem "Well, I will not involve all in a general eensure then," rejoined my brother; " but I believe their religion, like that of the Pha-perance, and judgment to come, his sermon risees of old, corrects manners rather than morals " "They affect simplicity of dress," said Margaret," and I have known a female methodist take more time and pains in starching a cap border, than I do in curling my hair." "Besides," said my brother," their ignorance is unpardonable; I stopped a moment at Webster's barn-door the other night, and heard a black-handed, blue-coated fellow, reading Scripture in a manner as would make your hair stand on eud." "And 1," said John Freeman, "made one of the congregation a few evenings ago, when the preacher cried, looking round on the assembly, St. Paul says, I can do all things! He laid down his Bible, with an air of incredulity, and shaking his head, repeated, 'St. Paul says, he can do all things; I'll || lay him half-crown of that ;' and taking a halfcrown piece out of his pocket, he produced it to his bearers." "Aye," interrupted my brother," he had studied this brilliant flower of rhetoric, and borrowed the half-crown for the purpose." "Very likely, Sir," resumed John." But after a pause, finding St. Paul did not come forward and accept his wager, he cried, 'Hold! let us first be sure."And, taking up his Bible, he read, I can do all things-by the help of Christ,' says he, that's another affair, I'll not lay against that;' and put his halfcrown again into his pocket." "This is vulgarity bordering upon profane had passed unheeded; and, the next night of his preaching, his congregation would have met at the ale-house, or at foot-ball. Meu go to church to be gravely taught, or severely reprehended; neither of which is very pleasant. But it is very pleasant to be amused; and doubly so under the idea of performing the duties of religion. I have no doubt that Wesley, the great apostle of the methodists, knew this; aud intermixed anecdotes and familiar sayings in his discourses, as other itinerants hang up the figures of wild beasts to draw company; and it has frequently hap pened that some expression has struck the sinner with conviction or remorse, and made a convert of him, when he only went to see the shew." "If the methodists taught men their duty, by way of amusement,” said my brother, "it would be an improvement on the ivory letters and dissected maps of children. But they send them to the lowest pit of hell, by their own authority, and terrify them out of the little reason they ever had to guide them." "Some farce and some tragedy, brother," said I; "if amusement bring them together, terror holds them. The graud secret is to let neither predominate too much." The clock now struck eleven, our signal to retire. John Freeman took home his daughter; and my brother, shaking me heartily by the hand, bade me good night. (To be continued.) THE MIRROR OF FASHION. IN A SERIES OF LETTERS FROM A GENTLEMAN OF RANK AND TASTE, TO A LADY OF QUALITY. LETTER II. (Continued from Page 83.) WILL your Ladyship deign to linger with me yet a few short hours on the banks of the Nile, and so add another goddess to the divine visitants of Egypt ?-Consent, my Urania, and I will lead you far from the path of the crocodile; the marauding ibis shall not alarm you with its screams; neither shall any stranger of the cauine or feline tribe startle your footsteps. Your seat shall be under the farstretching branches of the palm, while the water-lilies wave their fragrant heads, and your Paris, reclining amidst the luxuriant grass, will relate the fashions of other times. The grave Herodotus is my authority for informing you that the ancient Egyptian ladies wore only one garment. Its materials were light, but not transparent; it shewed all the graces of form, without making discoveries repugnant to modesty. It is not to your Ladyship that I need hint the power and beauty of modesty. She is woman's best friend; she is woman's praise and security; her soft voice bears the sweetest witness to woman's gentle virtues; and her timid reserve shrinks from and escapes injury. Real modesty is the loveliest garment of beauty; it is as inestimable to the possessor, as fair in the eyes of man and angels. So precious is it, that even its counterfeit is valuable. Female shamelessness is so horrible, that men would have your sex "affect the virtue when they have it not." Indeed, the most voluptuous of our sex, would rather fancy some of woman's charms, than have his imagination checked and his eye satisfied at once with a full display. Women are never so little admired for personal attraction, as when they exhibit, without any veil, the beauties they possess. A lover's imagination is not less vivid than the poet's. As I never had the honour of beholding any of the ancient Cleopatras of the Nile, I cannot affirm that the solitary robe was in all respects as friendly to modesty as its texture. It bore the name of calasiris, and was usually made of linen, ornamented with a border of fringe at the bottom. The common colour was white; and the fair wearers were very delicate in preserving its purity and snowy hue, by making it pass through the water at least once a day. The degrees of rank among the women were distinguished by the fineness of the texture of this garment, and by the richness of the accompanying decorations. Jewels|| of silver and jewels of gold were worn in great abundance, as both Holy Writ and Pagan Herodotus beareth witness. The pectoral was a becoming, and often costly addition to the dress. It was a kind of tippet of the shape of our modern pellerines, or furred capes. Its fundamental fabric was likewise of linen; but according to the wealth and quality of the owner, it was overlaid with embroidery and jewels. Both men and women wore this appendage; in the one it was a modest and graceful covering to the bosom; in the other, like its resemblance the antique gorget, it was a military defence. rowed plumage from the air, but not precisely with the same effect.-When Urania mingles the golden hues of paradise with her auburn tresses, the entranced eye is lost in the beauteous maze of interwoven charms; but when the princesses of Egypt came forth arrayed in their borrowed plumes, they displayed them on a shaven crown!-Imagine, fair damsel of the radiant locks!-imagine the possibility of a bald-headed beauty!-Yet so it was with the ladies of Egypt; it was alike a principle i their taste, and a dogma of their religion, that they should shave their heads. It is probable, that as their neighbours, the Ethopians, wove their tresses into garments for themselves, the nimble-fingered descendants of Isis, might, sometimes turn their shorn locks to good account on a similar plan. Most of the African nations assumed the babits of as little actual weight as possible. In their most savage state, decency seems the first mover in the fashions of their garments; and, as refinement proceeds, then follow the desire to please, and the consequent adoption of ornaments. The eastern Ethiopians (now called Abyssinians, your Ladyship cannot but recollect that nation in the person of Prince Raselas), clothed themselves and their ladies in hairy mantles, some the growth of their own heads, and others torn from the hides of lions or leopards, slain in the chase. The statues in our galleries of Hercules, might very well be mistaken by a damsel of the upper Nile, for a tribe of her Ethiop lovers. The virgins of Lybia had the honour of setting the fashions to no less a personage than a goddess; and, what is more amazing, and marvelously to their fame, it was to the wise, chaste, and redoubted Minerva. Herodotus is the recorder of the divine toilet, and he informs us, that the apparel and ægis of the Goddess of Wisdom, were the invention and common garbs of the Lybian women. These ladies wore a pectoral and mantle of goat's skin, dyed red, and fringed with thongs. From this pectoral and robe were copied the garments and the gorget of Minerva, to which the Greeks gave the name of agis, making no other difference in the description than chang The head-dresses of the Egyptian dames can only be paralleled with the ever-varying fashions of our British fair.-Earth, sea, and sky were obliged to surrender their treasures at their command.-Flowers, feathers, and shells, took their alternate reigns in the coiffures of these sun-burnt ladies. And, whating the leather thongs into serpents. The may be rather remarkable, we never see a more perfect copy of an Egyptian fashion, than when a lady enters one of our drawing-rooms with a bird of paradise in her head. damsels of Pharoah's court wore the plumes and body of that beautiful bird, just as your Ladyship wears them at St. James's. I mean to be understood with reference to the bor The name is sufficient to testify that the stole, or robe of the Palladion, originated in Lybia. All these nations seem to have shared the taste of your Ladyship in their love of the pelucid stream, and all the luxuries of the bath It was their morning and evening duty and relaxation; and the first objects which saluted the eyes of the sun as he rose from be hind the deserts of Arabia, were the glowing dames of Africa laving their polished limbs in the translucent wave. The same ablutory rites greeted his setting beams; and he descended to other regions to witness, 1 fear, a far less lovely regimen of health and beauty. Here no cosmetics withered the youthful cheek; nor paint obliterated the hue of nature.Freshness and bloom were sought and obtained in the pure embraces of the vivifying waters. The fair daughters of Israel, and his valiant sous, when they quitted. Egypt for Palestine, carried with them many of the good as well as evil habits of their hosts and oppres 8015. The calasiris was one of their exportations. It was usually worn by them as an inferior garment; and is sometimes called by Jewish historians by the simple name of sheet. With us, could I dare drop from my pen one of the words proscribed in the vocabulary of British female nicety, you should have the auswering name at once in plain English!But as that may not be, I will whisper it in French, and tell my fair Urania, that the likest thing in the world. to an ancient calasiris is a modern chemise. A similar interior covering, made of linen, cotton, or camel's hair, is still worn by the Turks, Arabs, and Aloors, and we even read of it in the pages of Mungo Park, as a customary garment with the negro nations on the barks of the Gambia and Niger. When we recollect the antiquity of the fashion of wearing a chemise, and consider its intimate connection with decency, we cannot make so great a sacrifice to gallautry as to approve the prevailing custom among the modern belles, of altogether banishing that inodest veil from their wardrobe. Frown not, beauteous Urania, and decent as thou art fair! that I should presume, in thy presence, to enter on so delicate a subject!-On this theme I consider myself as writing under the misletoe; and as all things are free beneath the branches of that mysterious shrub (while I promise not to play the Gallic democrat,¦¦ and extend my liberty to licentiousness), expect that even your potent Ladyship will not venture, by proclaiming silence, to invade my rights. The sacred boughs of druidical devotion are now waving over my head, and sanctioned by their privilege, I proceed freely on my subject. I proclaim myself Chevalier de la Chemise! 1 fight before the banner of the fair Queen of Sweden, who a century or two ago, chose to elerate her interior garment of that name, upon a flag stuff, and send it forth to battle as the royal standard !-I, at least, regard it as the standard of modesty; and when ladies, impelled by an idea of removing envious folds, and displaying their shapes to greater advantage, cast it away for an adhesive vesture more becoining a man, and then shade that with an invisi le petticoat and almost trausparent lawn, I cannot but proclaim such ladies as deserters from the decency of their sex ;, and I admonish them, that having over stepped the bounds of modesty, they are standing on the very brink of the precipice of female virtue, and one movement further will cast them headlong to the depths bencath. The grossest order of rakes may possibly tolerate such abandonment of the natural graces of the sex; but the usual order of men of gallantry, while they are amused with the display, turn with contempt from the fair exhibitor-But how shall I describe the feelings of a man of honour and refinement, gazing on such exposure-Disgust and abhorrence fills his heart towards the woman who so appears; and he would sooner suffer the extinction of the human race, than unite his hand and fate with such a creature, Both Over the colasiris the tunic was worn. the men and women of Israel adopted it; the rougher texture being for the one sex, and the softer for the other. This garment is called chethomene, by Josephus, and was very graceful. It was long and Sowing, reaching to the ankles, and, with the ladies, sometimes sweeping the ground. The sleeves were straight, shewing the shape of the arm. It was usually made of fine linçu, bordered and fringed with many colours; and often, in addition to the elegance of this garment, they wore a purple or scarlet mantle. When men wore this graceful, though cumbrous habit, the girdle was an indispensible appendage to the dress; especially to those who were engaged in any employment or exercises which required freedom and agility. The girale was bound about the loins, when worn by the laity; but the chethomenes of the priests were girt under the breasts. On entering a house, it was customary for the man to loose his girdle, and lay it aside, in token that he came to take rest. It was replaced in its former situation on his body when he rose to depart; and for this reason, when the Scripture means to inculcate a state of readiness, it metaphorically says, "Be your luins girded." These girdles were often of splendid ma terials; embroidered, gold, silver, studded with precious stones. They were not denied to the women, who wore them like the cestuş of Venus, immediately under the swell of the they wore in front of their foreheads, “Thou, bosom. shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife?" Or do The mantle, or hyke, is one of the most au- you believe that our married dames would so cient, and sometimes the most gorgeous of readily fall into the arms of a seducer, if their the Jewish habit. It was vast in its dimen-braceleted arms were stamped with the imsions, and by numerous and well adapted folds, || prêsse, “ Thou shalt not commit adultery.” would completely and gracefully envelope the whole body; it is still worn by the Arabs; and,|| indeed, in form and use, is not much different from the plaid of the Highlanders in Scotland. The diadem, or fillet of gold, was an ornament worn by the princes and princesses of Judea, and personages of the higest rauks. The same kind of crown was placed on the heads of the bridal pair of whatever degree, at the marriage. The tiara, or bounet, called in qur translation of the Bible, the head-tye, was the ladies' most favourite head-dress. It was of a conical form, and admitted much oruament in embroidery and gems. Phylacteris, or frontlets, formed an indispensible part of the Jewish habit. They consisted of scrolls to wear as bracelets, and in front of their fillets in their foreheads. They contained some short sentence from the Law of Moses. A modern traveller, describing the || dress of the Arabs of Yemen, particularly notices their cap, which was often embroidered in the most costly style, with words from the Koran.This custom is clearly derived from the Jews; and I cannot but wish that the ladies of our Christian lauds had a similar practice. I will not be so partial to my own sex, as not to desire that the same good custom were extended to men. What think you, my lovely widow, would our British lords and gentlemen be so likely to get within the pale of Doctors' Commons, if While our hunters after fashions ransack, every kingdom of the earth, to bring home a new cap or bounet for the beads of our ladies, how beneficially would they exert their influence in the world at large, if they were to introduce a few of these obsolete, but becom ing Jewish and Arabic modes!-Perhaps our squeamish wanderers from the path of decorum, might shrink at bearing about them such plain-speaking lessons as those quoted || above-Poets might then be brought into very pretty pay to devise neat couplets which might contain the same spirit of counsel, in more courtly language; and thus morality, religion, and the divers callings of men and women be alike promoted. The wearer would profit by the apothegm on her forehead or arm; to compose it, would profit the poet, in being paid for his pains; to embroider it, would profit the hired sempstress.In short, it would be a matter of cotumerce, a matter of intellectual improvement, a matter of personal ornament; a matter of private good, and public benefit — And thus having explained the reason of my wish for decking my fair countrywomen with wise sentences within and without, I bid your Ladyship a short adieu! promising to open the wardrobe of ancient days again, in my next epistle. Your PARIS. (To be continued.) LETTERS ON MYTHOLOGY. TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF C. A. DEMOUSTIER. LETTER V. (Continued from Page 72.) scended from heaven, and slily approached I AM not going to elect myself into an the retreat of her rival. Jupiter having foreumpire of matrimonial quarrels, but I must seen it, changed lo into a cow. Suspecting discourse to you a little upon the domestic the transformation, Juno demanded the cow of broils of Jupiter and Juno, The latter has her husband, who resigned it with regret; the been universally accused of bitterness, pride, Queen then confided it to the care of her faith. and jealousy; suffer me to produce one in- ful Argus. Though this worthy gentleman stance out of a thousand.—Jupiter loved Io, || had a hundred eyes, their aid was worth nothe daughter of inachus. Io was not uugrate-thing; Love sees better with two than Jealousy ful; Jupiter was faithful. Alas! men are always more constant as lovers than as huspapas. Furious at this preference, Juno de with a thousand. Argus never slept but in that fashion which is vulgarly termed a dog's sleep; in short, he peacocks; she held a sceptre in her hand, and her brow was crowned with lilies and roses. only closed half his eyes. Mercury drew near Meanwhile poor lo, tormented by the Furies, traversed the Mediterranean and arrived in Egypt, where Jupiter restored her to her pristine shape. It was here that she brought Epaphus into the world; and it is here that she has been adored under the name of Isis, and represented under the form of a woman with the head of a cow. Juno sulked a long time, but Jupiter turned ber into jest, and gave out that he was going to marry Platea, daughter of Asopus. At this distracting intelligence, and quite beside herself, Juno ran, fell upon the betrothed virgin, and tearing off her veil and robes, found under || them the trunk of a tree, cut into the figure of Platea. After a moment of mortification and shame, Juuo blushed, Jupiter laughed; a kiss was exchanged, aud peace made. Vulcan, the sole fruit of their union, owed his birth to this reconciliation. Near her temple flowed a fountain, the water of which she took every year. We hear much of the waters of Spa, Forges, Plombieres, &c.; we are told they restore health, but those of Argos renewed youth and virgiWhat a pity that such a spring does not exist in our days! Juno presided over marriages and labours, under the name of Lucina. The feasts which were celebrated to her honour at Rome were called the lupercalia. During these feasts, two or three naked fellows, uttering discordant cries, ran against the Roman women, striking their stomachs and their bands, to prevent miscarriages. The instrument used for this discipline was the skin of a goat, which they pretended had once been worn by Juno. I have forgotten to speak to you of Iris, her confidant and messenger. Grateful for her services, the Goddess transported her to the heavens; she gave her wings, and clothed her in a violet-coloured robe, the brightness of which leaves in the sky a track of light, called || by mortals the rainbow. Assuredly it is with good reason that Juno is accused of jealousy, but every one renders justice to her wisdom. Nevertheless, though notorious for the most severe virtue, she contrived to have two children, of whom Jupiter was not the father. She had always been harren, but following the advice of Apollo, her || family physician, she ate a dish of wild sallad at the celestial banquet, conceived Hebe, and was delivered of her the same instant. Hebe was the amiable Goddess of Youth; her hand distributed the nectar at the table of the Gods; but these masters of the universe were more frequently intoxicated by the sweet brightness of her eyes, than by the sparkling beverage they drank from the cup. Not satisfied with one miracle, Juno wished to try another. Picqued to find that Jupiter had singly produced Minerva, she consulted the Goddess Flora upon the means of effecting a similar production. Flora discovered to her a flower, the mere touch of which would complete her project. Juno touched it, and Mars came into the world. The place in which Juno enjoyed the utmost glory was the city of Argos. Her feasts were celebrated there by the sacrifice of a hecatomb; that is to say, a hundred bulls. The Goddess was represented upon a brilliant car, drawn by And now, my Emilia, let us return to the Thunderer. One fine morning Jupiter, ovetcome with a ferocious head-ache, ordered Vulcan to open his head, upon which Minerva leaped out, completely armed. In these times the foreheads of men are no longer brought-to-bed; but I am told that they often indicate, by certain signs, when their ladies are in the straw. I have learned this singular circumstance from some of the initiated, the testimony of whom is founded upon long experience, and who carry about with them authentic proofs of that which they advance. Minerva took the arts under her protection; she invented writing, painting, and embroi. dery. But the work upon which she prided herself most was tapestry, and she excelled in it, Arachne having pretended to equal her in this species of weaving, received a blow from the shuttle upon her fingers, and was changed into a spider. The talents which she preserves under this new form, make us regret the loss of those she exercised formerly. Minerva was a musician also; she played the flute; but as that instrument spoils the mouth, and fatigues the lungs, she threw it into the fountain where she had been drawing water to refresh herself. You need not be told that Minerva's appearance was very unlike that of our Parisians. She is represented with a helmet on her head, a lance in her band, her breast covered with a cuirass, and her arm |